Hundreds of San Antonio students plan to join ‘National...

1of2About 100 students at Canyon High School in New Braunfels demonstrated Wednesday for stricter gun control laws.Photo: Bennet Emmons, Courtesy

2of2A group of student at Brandeis HS hold up protest signs in front of the school, voicing their opinions against guns, on Friday, March 9, 2018.Photo: Bob Owen, Staff / San Antonio Express-News

Hundreds of students at schools across San Antonio are expected to walk out of class Friday morning as part of a nationally organized protest of gun violence.

The walkouts will add to demonstrations held by students across the country in the wake of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, which sparked widespread student activism calling for greater safety and gun control measures.

Only a couple of schools in the San Antonio area have seen such protests since the Feb. 14 massacre. Most Texas schools were on Spring Break on March 14, when students in other states commemorated its one-month anniversary.

Friday will mark the first nationally coordinated effort that falls on a school day here. The April 20 “National School Walkout” date was selected to commemorate the anniversary of the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado.

While school districts in San Antonio have varied in their approaches to addressing student protests, all seem to have avoided a decision to respond with hard-line disciplinary measures such as suspension.

Two weeks before the March walkouts, San Antonio Independent School District said students planning protests or other events related to school safety were working with principals to hold peaceful assemblies on campus grounds. Any student leaving campus would receive an unexcused absence.

“We respect and support the right of our students to advocate for causes that are important to them,” said Leslie Price, SAISD spokeswoman, in a prepared statement.

That policy will remain in place Friday, Price said. Some schools are planning moments of silence or indoor assemblies, while students at other schools will rally on campus lawns.

Northside and North East ISDs, Bexar County’s two largest school districts, have said they will assign unexcused absences to students who walk out of class.

Aubrey Chancellor, spokeswoman for NEISD, said the district is trying to “keep consequences to a minimum” for students who decide to participate in a demonstration during school hours.

“If they want to go, we are not stopping them,” she said. “We are just trying to make sure they stay safe, whichever choice they decide.”

Barry Perez, spokesman for Northside, said the district plans to discourage students from leaving class and to redirect them to other activities. Classrooms have had discussions regarding the walkout and other political issues that arose from the Florida shooting, including some students who wrote letters to elected representatives, he said.

“We’re not going to obviously physically stop any child from participating in a walkout if they so choose to do that,” Perez said. “What we have done and tried to do proactively is to provide students an opportunity so they can participate in structured, safe discussions and other activities in the classroom, to help persuade them to do those structured things as opposed to a walkout.”

Perez added that the district “will not tolerate students protesting loudly in hallways or disrupting classes in any way.”

In March, about a dozen students left class at Brandeis High School for more than an hour to protest gun violence and call for gun control reform. The students were not disciplined for the demonstration.

Also last month, a crowd of about 100 students at Canyon High School in New Braunfels held their own rally outside the school to call for more stringent gun laws.

Lauren Caruba covers health care and medicine at the Express-News, where she has been a staff writer since October 2016.

She previously covered education, writing about state oversight of San Antonio schools, controversy over a high school's Confederate namesake and the hazing and sexual assault arrests of 13 student-athletes at La Vernia ISD. She also authored "Life in Transition," a series documenting the lives of transgender San Antonians and the divisive "bathroom bill" debate, for which she was recognized as a 2018 local reporting finalist in the Livingston Awards for Young Journalists.

Lauren previously was an investigative fellow at the Houston Chronicle, where she worked with documents and databases and supported investigative projects. While there she wrote "55 Minutes," a three-part serial narrative about a mass shooting in a west Houston neighborhood, was a member of an investigative team probing conditions at the Harris County Jail, and delved into the history of Houston's aging flood control dams.

Lauren graduated from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in 2015.